There will be four keynote speakers at the PLE2011 conference, and in line with last years keynotes we have asked them all to prepare an innovative (or unkeynote) approach to their presentations and to involve conference participants in the presentations.
Scott Wilson is an Assistant Director of CETIS. His areas of interest and responsibility include enterprise systems, identity management, personalisation, further education sector issues, and business processes. In January 2005, Scott Wilson published on his weblog a diagram illustrating a future vision for a VLE (and which later became incorporated into the Bolton PLE project). This vision was based around a personal system interacting with a range of Web 2.0 services as well as services offered by institutional systems to create a personal environment to support learning. Scott’s model also explicitly articulated the link between the personal learning environment (and learning process) with the presentation of an electronic portfolio.

Cristina Costa works at the University of Salford as the Research Technologies development officer. Her role is to champion innovative means of convening and disseminating research activity and promote collaborative research ventures with the use of new web technologies. Her research focuses on the use of participatory media in a changing environment and she is particularly interested in analysing the advantages and also the implications of using the social web for teaching, learning and research. More recently she has been focusing on Digital Scholarship. She was named Learning Technologist of the Year 2010 by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT).

Riina Vuorikari has worked for European Schoolnet (EUN) since 2002. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2009, dealt with systems that allow both top-down and bottom-up approaches for information and knowledge management, namely learning resource repositories that use both conventional metadata (e.g. LOM) and social metadata (e.g. tags, ratings, comments). Her continuing research aims at better understanding, capturing and modelling of contextual information within Technology Enhanced Learning in a multilingual and multicultural context. She co-chairs the workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) and currently works on a new theme of 1:1 computing in educational setting and manages the Acer-European Schoolnet pedagogical netbook pilot.

Dr Leslie Carr is a senior lecturer in the Web and Internet Sciences Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Dr. Carr is a co-Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, where he studies the impact of Open Access and Open Data on the scientific and scholarly research processes. As well as being the Project Director of a number of JISC projects including dotAC, DepositMO and KeepIt he is also the technical director of the EPrints Repository Software Team, director of EPrints Commercial Services and manager of the ECS research repository.

ABSTRACT

Any realistic debate on the future of Personal Learning Environments will inevitably draw on insights gained from the study of web science; the interdisciplinary research endeavor which tries to understand the interleaved social and technical processes that have produced the open webs of information and data.

The Web has increasingly included people in its activities, starting with the so-called Web 2.0-style social networking and social messaging services. But now a concept of “social machinery” is emerging, where processes, workflows and projects are designed and programmed around people’s activities as well as their computational devices. How will this fundamental re-imagining of ICT impact education? Will the current web consisting of a network of information and services be replaced by an engineered web of contacts, knowledge, experiences and pedagogic requirements? How will the reality of personal learning environments evolve reflecting emerging practices and the social machinery found in the workplace, home or classroom?

2. The PLE 2011 Mediacast Contest

In celebration of User Generated Content we will have a Mediacast Contest during the PLE Conference 2011 with awards for the best three mediacast productions on Personal Learning Environments. The contest is open to all registered conference participants, who can create their own mediacasts, such as vodcasts (video productions) or screencasts (mixed media productions) of three minutes or less sharing their ideas, reflections and applications of Personal Learning Environments and best suggestions for creating such environments for individuals, groups and communities.
We collect all mediacast submissions in our PLE 2011 Group at Vimeo public voting. The deadline for submissions is June 30th, 2011. The voting closes on Saturday 13th July 2011.
The winners will be announced and awarded during the PLE 2011 conference. All winning mediacasts will be viewable at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/groups/ple2011
We look forward to your creative contributions!

Following the highly successful inaugural event in Barcelona (#PLE_BCN), the next PLE Conference will be held at the University of Southampton (#PLE_SOU) from July 11th – 13th 2011. The PLE Conference 2011 is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in different formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations. We aim to sustain the dynamic and interactive discussion environment established by the opening event in Barcelona in 2010. The deadline for abstract submission is 10th April and you can see more details about the Call for Contributions here

We will keep on using the Crowdvine site from PLE_BCN (http://pleconference.crowdvine.com) where everyone interested in the conference can congregate. Do join it, if you haven’t already. It is a great opportunity to learn what other people are doing and identify researchers and practitioners who you might want to meet personally at PLE_SOU. Join now!
We encourage everyone to spread the word and write about the PLE Conference on the Web! When writing a blogpost, a Tweet, uploading photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube, saving your bookmarks or publishing any other information about the PLE Conference, please use the tag #PLE_SOU for the coming PLE conference in Southampton in 2011.

THE PLE CONFERENCE Newsletter is compiled by the PLE Organising Commitee. Please send any feedback, comments or suggestions to the PLE newsletter team at: plesou2011 [at] googlemail [dot] com
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